18 November. Rebellion are to reprint The Last American by Wagner, Grant and McMahon, originally published by Epic back in 1990 and reprinted by Com.X in 2004. The new edition will be out in April 2017.

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Sunday, October 19, 2008

Jane Eyre (Classical Comics)

Jane Eyre is one of a clutch of new titles that have come out from Classical Comics recently, the other two being Frankenstein and A Christmas Carol. Of the three, this was the one I was looking forward to the most, solely for the artwork by John M. Burns, possibly the finest comics artist working in the UK at the moment. Burns has been drawing comic strips professionally for fifty years and worked on everything from Modesty Blaise to Judge Dredd in that time. He brings to Jane Eyre the experience of someone who has drawn historical strips before (including, many years ago, adaptations of Wuthering Heights and Lorna Doone) and the skill to depict one of the essential ingredients of the story—Jane growing from a child of nine to a young woman of nineteen.

I doubt if I would have ever read Jane Eyre (or Wuthering Height and Lorna Doone, etc. for that matter) had it not been for comics—a bit too much of a girly historical romance for my usual tastes... and old fashioned... and probably clunky and full of thee-ing and thou-ing. Which is not the case. The language, albeit a little old fashioned, is actually quite clear to a modern audience even in the original text version I was reading; perhaps only one or two anachronistic words (at least a couple of words not in my vocabulary) but nothing to send you scurrying to a dictionary every five minutes.

Although the language is that used by Charlotte Bronte (the descriptions are abridged but the dialogue and captions are all from the original novel), there is no room for mistaking what the characters are saying or thinking thanks to the illustrations. The images bring the story to life with delightful clarity. You begin to notice things in the story that you might otherwise have missed. To take one little for instance: the book's metaphor of birds. "Birds were emblems of love," says Jane (p.91) and birds are a recurring motif of how Rochester imagines her, comparing her to a nonnette and a linnet; he imagines Jane will "come with soft flight and nestle against my heart." Burns draws each in the thoughts of the man as he speaks. Birds continue to feature throughout: when Jane runs away she is helped by sisters Diana and Mary "as they would a half-frozen bird"; at Ferndean, Mr Rochester is a "caged eagle"; his hair reminds Jane of an eagle's feathers and his "nails are grown like birds' claws"; and, lastly, Rochester compares her to a skylark and Jane decides that their relationship is "just as if a royal eagle, chained to a perch, must entreat a sparrow to become its purveyor." I wonder how many would spot this quite so easily had the artwork not made it so obvious in some of the frames.

Artistically, Jane Eyre is nothing short of superb and the book is an unexpected delight as poor Jane suffers one dreadful torment after another before she and her true love can finally be together. Classical Comics should be applauded for their efforts (indeed, they have been, with an IPPY award last May). The series is tied closely to the school curriculum, hence the concentration of Shakespeare, Dickens and other classics. They're good hunks of books, too, Jane Eyre running to 125 pages plus 8 pages of background material. If Jane Eyre is not your cup of tea, give one of the others a try: A Christmas Carol is a Dickens' classic with ghosts and artwork by Mike Collins & David Roach; Frankenstein adapts Mary Shelley's monster-fest with art by Declan Shalvey. There should be something for most tastes and if your tastes don't run to the original text, there's always the 'quick text' adaptations which modernise the language without losing any of the story elements.

4 comments:

This sounds wonderful! Like you say, John M. Burns has worked on everything. One of the oddest places for him to turn up was the early Wham! comic, amidst the Baxendale funnies. There, he drew the adventures of Kelpie the Boy Wizard. (Who said boy wizards began with Harry Potter?) Kelpie was medieval fantasy, of course, and ideally suited for the Burns style. I had the pleasure/privilege of scripting the Kelpie yarn that appeared in the first Wham! annual. Burns' depiction of my Macbeth-like witches was superb.

Im the script writer on the A CHRISTMAS CAROL book - where Mike Collins has done an outstanding job, along with David Roach and James Offredi as inker and colourer. Look for it in the window at Christmas time of Borders bookshops all across the UK! (they have supposedly decided to include it as part of their christmas displays). John M Burns is also doing the art on my adaptation of Wuthering Heights, though we have to wait until 2010 until that will be published!

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